My cruise in
the salmon boat lasted a week, and I returned ready to enter the university.
During the week's cruise I did not drink again. To accomplish this I was
compelled to avoid looking up old friends, for as ever the adventure-path
was beset with John Barleycorn. I had wanted the drink that first day, and
in the days that followed I did not want it. My tired brain had recuperated.
I had no moral scruples in the matter. I was not ashamed nor sorry because
of that first day's orgy at Benicia, and I thought no more about it, returning
gladly to my books and studies.

Long years were
to pass ere I looked back upon that day and realised its significance. At
the time, and for a long time afterward, I was to think of it only as a
frolic. But still later, in the slough of brain-fag and intellectual weariness,
I was to remember and know the craving for the anodyne that resides in alcohol.

In the meantime,
after this one relapse at Benicia, I went on with my abstemiousness, primarily
because I didn't want to drink. And next, I was abstemious because my way
led among books and students where no drinking was. Had I been out on the
adventure-path, I should as a matter of course have been drinking. For that
is the pity of the adventure-path, which is one of John Barleycorn's favourite
stamping grounds.

I completed the
first half of my freshman year, and in January of 1897 took up my courses
for the second half. But the pressure from lack of money, plus a conviction
that the university was not giving me all that I wanted in the time I could
spare for it, forced me to leave. I was not very disappointed. For two years
I had studied, and in those two years, what was far more valuable, I had
done a prodigious amount of reading. Then, too, my grammar had improved.
It is true, I had not yet learned that I must say "It is I"; but
I no longer was guilty of a double negative in writing, though still prone
to that error in excited speech.

I decided immediately
to embark on my career. I had four preferences: first, music; second, poetry;
third, the writing of philosophic, economic, and political essays; and,
fourth, and last, and least, fiction writing. I resolutely cut out music
as impossible, settled down in my bedroom, and tackled my second, third,
and fourth choices simultaneously. Heavens, how I wrote! Never was there
a creative fever such as mine from which the patient escaped fatal results.
The way I worked was enough to soften my brain and send me to a mad-house.
I wrote, I wrote everything--ponderous essays, scientific and sociological
short stories, humorous verse, verse of all sorts from triolets and sonnets
to blank verse tragedy and elephantine epics in Spenserian stanzas. On occasion
I composed steadily, day after day, for fifteen hours a day. At times I
forgot to eat, or refused to tear myself away from my passionate outpouring
in order to eat.

And then there
was the matter of typewriting. My brother-in-law owned a machine which he
used in the day-time. In the night I was free to use it. That machine was
a wonder. I could weep now as I recollect my wrestlings with it. It must
have been a first model in the year one of the typewriter era. Its alphabet
was all capitals. It was informed with an evil spirit. It obeyed no known
laws of physics, and overthrew the hoary axiom that like things performed
to like things produce like results. I'll swear that machine never did the
same thing in the same way twice. Again and again it demonstrated that unlike
actions produce like results.

How my back used
to ache with it! Prior to that experience, my back had been good for every
violent strain put upon it in a none too gentle career. But that typewriter
proved to me that I had a pipe-stem for a back. Also, it made me doubt my
shoulders. They ached as with rheumatism after every bout. The keys of that
machine had to be hit so hard that to one outside the house it sounded like
distant thunder or some one breaking up the furniture. I had to hit the
keys so hard that I strained my first fingers to the elbows, while the ends
of my fingers were blisters burst and blistered again. Had it been my machine
I'd have operated it with a carpenter's hammer.

The worst of
it was that I was actually typing my manuscripts at the same time I was
trying to master that machine. It was a feat of physical endurance and a
brain storm combined to type a thousand words, and I was composing thousands
of words every day which just had to be typed for the waiting editors.

Oh, between the
writing and the typewriting I was well a-weary. I had brain and nerve fag,
and body fag as well, and yet the thought of drink never suggested itself.
I was living too high to stand in need of an anodyne. All my waking hours,
except those with that infernal typewriter, were spent in a creative heaven.
And along with this I had no desire for drink because I still believed in
many things--in the love of all men and women in the matter of man and woman
love; in fatherhood; in human justice; in art--in the whole host of fond
illusions that keep the world turning around.

But the waiting
editors elected to keep on waiting. My manuscripts made amazing round-trip
records between the Pacific and the Atlantic. It might have been the weirdness
of the typewriting that prevented the editors from accepting at least one
little offering of mine. I don't know, and goodness knows the stuff I wrote
was as weird as its typing. I sold my hard-bought school books for ridiculous
sums to second-hand bookmen. I borrowed small sums of money wherever I could,
and suffered my old father to feed me with the meagre returns of his failing
strength.

It didn't last
long, only a few weeks, when I had to surrender and go to work. Yet I was
unaware of any need for the drink anodyne. I was not disappointed. My career
was retarded, that was all. Perhaps I did need further preparation. I had
learned enough from the books to realise that I had only touched the hem
of knowledge's garment. I still lived on the heights. My waking hours, and
most of the hours I should have used for sleep, were spent with the books.

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